This past weekend LAUSD had their Round 1 meet, which saw Granada Hills win at around 33k. Grant was 2nd at 30k, followed by Palisades Charter at 27k. Seems like it will be a pretty hard set of tests which is exciting. No news on ECR however. Scores can be found here

It’s worth noting that Franklin’s reported scores are extremely wrong, with their actual score most likely being around 30k. We’re still unsure as to what caused this massive discrepancy, but I imagine we won’t be able to figure it out until someone from LAUSD decides to fill us in.

I think this is a ridiculous way to make tests "more difficult". Art, Econ, and Science especially are tests those top scorers usually finish with 10+ minutes left anyway. Adding 5 questions will probably do nothing. It will just make looking at scores really confusing when we see a tie for Science gold with a score of 981.8, which is just strange.

“Math scores are a problem because decimals. Let’s now make an extra 3 subjects have decimals, but this time without a convenient pattern.”

As far as math goes, this is extremely frustrating to me. Rather than fixing the actual issue by just making the tests’ questions more difficult, they’re instead attempting to arbitrarily increase difficulty by making the test significantly longer. Not only does this not really solve the issue of tests being too easy (and thus too many ties at the top end), but it’s actually going to worsen the problem in my opinion. Due to the test being even longer, they’re going to be forced to continue to be very light on the difficulty of these tests, as a truly difficult math test is simply too long to be able to score well on with 45 questions (outside of the best/fastest math kids, and even then). So test difficulty won’t change by any noticeable amount to the types who’d be medalling anyways, so we’re going to be dealing with the same number of ties, but now with slightly higher scores since each missed question is less of a penalty now. As Sebastian himself put it, “Look at 2011 and tell me there aren’t enough questions”. Since 2016, and maybe even earlier, math is just getting easier and easier, and they’re approaching “fixing” it in an absolutely dreadful way.

Hey everyone! As anybody with experience on DDT can attest to, there are always a lot of really long dead periods on the board, most especially during the summer. Due to this, I wanted to get some conversations going, and I figured summer progress and team goals is a great place to start! For Morton, this year is definitely being handled differently than last year, as I learned a lot about trusting kids when they say they’re reading (without being the official coach in-class, I miss out on a lot of the proof I’d be able to see in there). As such, this summer’s focus is just going to be on making sure everybody is actually reading. High hopes for the season, but I’m staying quiet until I see the proof in the pudding

I have a ton of plans over the summer, and I'm hoping they actually work! I think the guides (for the most part) are pretty interesting, and I'm really looking forward to this year! I'd like to say that this summer is shaping up to be better and more productive for both me and my team than last year, but it's a bit early to tell! I think the people we recruited this year are all great people, and the team seems to be bonding already, which is important (for me, at least). Granted, the summer just started (It hasn't even been a week yet), so there's a high chance that I'm being far too optimistic. XD

Recruitment is going better than last year, which is good! (I mean, last year, we had to recruit a new varsity two days before region, so almost anything is better!)

Besides that, it's extremely hard to tell how we're going to perform this year, but I'm hoping that the summer goes well!

Any chance y'all will have the depth to support your utterly insane honors division? I've so badly been wanting to see Wakeland stand with the best teams, as last year you and Labiba showed just how much your team is capable of! My H1 from last year (one of the 9k sophomores) is gunning for you, and I can't wait for the season to start!

Hey everyone! As anybody with experience on DDT can attest to, there are always a lot of really long dead periods on the board, most especially during the summer. Due to this, I wanted to get some conversations going, and I figured summer progress and team goals is a great place to start! For Morton, this year is definitely being handled differently than last year, as I learned a lot about trusting kids when they say they’re reading (without being the official coach in-class, I miss out on a lot of the proof I’d be able to see in there). As such, this summer’s focus is just going to be on making sure everybody is actually reading. High hopes for the season, but I’m staying quiet until I see the proof in the pudding

How about a Discord Chat, there can be separate "channels" (basically subchats) for like decathlon, coaching, and the different subjects. Just asking for what you guys think. Here's the link: https://discordapp.com/

This is an awesome idea. Has a mobile app, provides the ability to create as many channels as we want, allows us to restrict access to certain channels if so desired, and even allows for the use of audio/video calls for anything we want to use it for

Judge training is difficult, at best. You'll always have judges that showed up late because of their schedule, last-minute replacements, and the like. That's just how these events are put together.

That then means you also get judges that are grading like they really don't care at all about what they're doing. There should be a way to simply drop those judges' scores if they're going like... straight 2s except for one kid that gets 10s. Or straight 10s except for one kid that gets 2s. We don't need Santa Claus or The Grinch in as judges. We need people that are putting some thought into this.

I think the essay idea of taking the two closest is a better option. If someone is too bubbly about everything, then all their scores are gone. If someone doesn't want to be there, then all of theirs are gone. I also think ranking each room from a max of 1,000 (top scorer gets that automatically), then scaling down from there would really balance out a lot of those problems. Would it boost scores? Of course, but a)USAD wants to do that anyways, and it would make things way more equitable between rooms. How many overall individual medals have been decided by being in the wrong or right subs room?

Speaking from the experience of both judging and training for essay, I feel that there are a lot of enormous flaws in the event at almost every level. What you suggest, the top-score-gets-1,000-then-scale idea can work, but there are issues with it as well. For instance, at Region VII this past season, there was one essay topic (I don’t recall which) that didn’t have a single truly great essay—there were plenty of 600-700 scores, but practically nobody above that level. I personally have an issue with the top of that pool being given the same score as, say, Achutha, whose essay was truly astonishingly strong. Beyond that, essay judging isn’t done the same as speech and interview, with there being separate rooms, or even separate groups. We generally separated the essays into three groups (one for each topic) and separated into three groups ourselves, with group sizes generally correlating to the size of the stack of essays for each topic. However, due to variations in grading speed, along with the relatively common need for a 3rd reader (it happened a looooot at Region VII this year and last), which judges graded which essays varied constantly and there was practically no consistency in it. As such, denoting what the different “rooms” would be from which to build the 1,000-then-scale stuff would be very hard to do.

Please don’t take this as a dismissal of your ideas, though—I do really and truly like your ideas and they’d certainly be better than what USAD is doing right now. I just want the problems to be discussed and fleshed out, that way proper solutions can be worked on in such a way that these proposed changes are justifiable in most every way... something USAD clearly never did with practically any of their policies.